If you could improve one thing about Atlas, what would you change?

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Hi Mendix Community! We are constantly working on improving your experience in Studio and Studio Pro. To do that, we need your input šŸ™‚ I have a question for those of you who have built a couple of apps with Mendix and are familiar with Atlas UI: If you could improve one thing about Atlas, what would you change? Note: If you want to help us with Atlas UI future improvements, please drop me an email so we could ask you a few more questions. Thanks! Kindest regards, Sepideh 
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Hi Sepideh,

if I had to choose one thing for Atlas UI it would be this:

- Can we get a stripped version please of Atlas UI? Consisting of a stylesheet declaration that doesn't clash with bootstrap but enhances it, same for mxui and without !important rules. Preferably in the form of an output that uses the Mendix SDK to generate the Atlas UI module, with optimized classes. And also generate layouts based on what you desire for a layout. Because imagine if I didn't want a layout grid in my Atlas_Default layout header. Or not wanting a Navbar brand icon, or a sidebar menu. And while you select the things you want also generate a non-appstore module containing layouts inheriting from the Atlas defaults, which gets preferred for usage in other modules. Separate CSS in custom and lib, where lib = atlas + bootstrap + mxui merged into one beast.

- Atlas UI layouts and building blocks are just too complicated, too many containers are being used. They feel clunky and inconsistent mostly. With the already dense DOM used by Mendix to build up the structure I feel like there is a lot of room for improvement here.

- 12 column layout grid used within a container for pageheaders?

- Flexbox items are lacking proper control of Flexbox functionality automatically resulting in the need for own flexbox classes writing which then over complicates things because it will start clashing with Atlas.

- The new styling toggles in appearance are totally unacceptable for production apps, especially mobile apps. Like do we really want each DOM element to be looking like this?

<div class="mx-listview mx-listview-selectable mx-name-listView1 spacing-outer-top-medium spacing-outer-bottom spacing-outer-left-large spacing-outer-right pull-left hidden-xs listview-stylingless hidden-sm listview-hover listview-lg" id="mxui_widget_ListView_5" data-mendix-id="7_1" widgetid="mxui_widget_ListView_5" style=""><ul class="mx-list mx-list-striped mx-listview-list">

- Using flexbox in combination with pull classes that are meant for float seems a little unclean, also I believe it causes visual glitching as soon as you start introducing % widths. 

- Preview mode of the snippets / building blocks while browsing for the right building block page would be nice, the duration that I need now to look for something I can add it myself now usually for the easier building blocks.

- Add a css grid component to Mendix.

- Allow for advanced users to modifying XML page structure / source files.

- Make layouts use flexbox properties instead of calculating a height with hard set pixels etc.

Basically all the above can be summarized, "reduce clutter and modernize and optimize for mobile”.

Something else that might inspire the UI /front-end team of Mendix: https://youtu.be/AdNJ3fydeao since Mendix is a compiler too.

 

 

 

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luckily theres an idea forum with a topic documenting this exact problem

The State of UX design & Mendix
https://forum.mendix.com/link/ideas/1183

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Kind of like currently we hardly ever need to dive in to Java, Javascript and React:

Integrate Atlas and all the classes into MendixStudio&MendixStudioPro in such a way that we hardly ever need to make any css changes in the scss-files anymore. Just select the class at every element’s class via a dropdown.

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Dark theme !!!!

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